This morning, I had the privilege to continuously deliver our Continuous Discussions podcast from the airport, while waiting to board my flight to London for the first DevOps Enterprise Summit in Europe! (turns out, the airport wifi rocks, so thank you SFO!)

This time, we discussed Continuous Improvement.

DevOps and Continuous Delivery are essentially a Journey – on a path of on-going optimization. How do you continually optimize your software delivery process to improve your IT and organizational performance?

At the end of the day, while technology and automation do play a part — it starts with the people. Culture is the most crucial ingredient of DevOps. It may also be shared in your company’s “values” or “vision” deck, but – more importantly – culture is first and foremost manifested in the everyday workings of your organization.

We asked our panelists for concrete tactics used by organizations to foster the right culture and organizational atmosphere to foster continuous improvement. How do you encourage collaboration, creativity, can-do attitude and commitment – in order to facilitate change?

We discussed the key prerequisites for continuous improvements and lessons learned from the field and tips around Organizational Design, Communication, Automation, Measurement and Experimentation, and Blameless Culture for facilitating and empowering change.

Watch the replay of the episode below to learn more.

As a side note, Anders Wallgren was not able to join us for this episode – as he was continuously working on his tan and Mai Tai delivery while vacationing in Hawaii. So while we did not get the benefit of his expertise, (he’ll be back on the c9d9 anchor chair in 2 weeks, live from Chefcon) — lucky for us, he did address some aspects of continuous improvement as part of his recent interview with SD Times on driving digital transformation – so check it out. Also, read the blog post that Chris Nicola mentions on the show about the the Null Process here.

J. Paul Reed has over 15 years experience in the trenches as a build/release engineer, working with such companies as VMware, Mozilla, Symantec, and Salesforce. He speaks internationally on release engineering, DevOps, operational complexity, and human factors.